Re: My Romance
Reed Kotler ( reed@reedkotler.com )
Mon, 26 May 1997 11:36:34 +0100
At 10:46 AM 5/26/97 -0400, you wrote:
>reed wrote:
>>
>> At 02:01 PM 5/25/97 -0800, you wrote:
>> >I'm not trying to prove you wrong, Reed, about either the value of
>> >transcription or the evils of chord/scale zealotry. I thought maybe the
>> >experience I described suggested there was a middle ground that says
>> >there is value in learning chord/scale relationships even if applying
>> >them chord by chord isn't the road to good melodic improvisation.
>> >>
>> Well you shouldnt believe anything I say anyway. You need to
>> question everything and come to your own conclusions. It's too
>> scary to think of someone wasting their musical life by blindly
>> believing anyone elses dogma.
>>
>> I do think that you should transcribe and answer questions
>> for yourself about what people are doing.
>>
>The fine thing about transcribing is you finally get away from this or
>that persons theoretical approach. You are just working directly on the
>music for yourself. You might come up with a theoretical system for
>codifying your insights for your own playing, your own way of thinking
>about soloing, but the real benefit isn't the system, it's the direct
>exposure to the music. Someone else may develop a different system for
>organizing what they've learned in transcription, and you can debate the
>systems, but transcribing and composing seem to be things that nobody
>disputes as keys to great musicianship. If by transcribing you include
>"close imitation" then even those who apparently never "transcribed"
>still learned from imitating.
>
>BTW I found in Ross Russell's biography of Charlie Parker a paragraph
>describing how Bird would adjust the set screw on a record player to
>SLOW DOWN recordings by Lester Young so he could learn them note for
>note. At the same time, pianist Carrie Powell and guitarist Eferge Ware
>were tutoring him in harmony.This was during a summer job in 1937 at
>Lake Taneycomo in the Ozarks. The story is in chapter 7 of "Bird Lives."
>
>> The big problem I have with chord scales is that I see no evidence
>> whatsoever that the great players were doing that. This makes we wonder
>> where it came from.
>>
>It probably came from early players' solos often hanging around chord
>tones, and many descriptions of bebop tend to stress improvising on the
>"upper intervals" of chords. The link between harmony and melody has to
>be thought through, and chord-scale approaches seem to be one "after the
>fact" explanation.
>
>I think Reed has successfully shown us many times that this explanation
>does not really serve well in explaining how great players actually
>create their music. It is a "post mortem" type of thing. But we all hope
>in analysis that somehow by studying the final form we can recreate the
>creative process. Unfortunately, there are many types of analyses that
>could conceivably explain a given work of art. That they coherently
>describe or explain it doesn't make them good vehicles for reproducing
>that art. I think that's the trap with chord-scale as a comprehensive
>theory of improvisation. A tool that can provide a pretty satisfying
>"explanation" of a line already played work as a creative approach.
>Description and Prescription are not always correlative.
>
One important point in all of this, is whether Charlie Parker can
do what he does because of some sort of divine inspiration not
available to the rest of us of whether it was the result of
how he approached things.
Often shoddy theory incapable of explaining how the final
product could be produced is explained away by saying, oh well Charlie
Parker or Beethoven or Bach or .... was a genius. In other words
the theory is supposedly correct and the reason the rest of us
can't produce such a product is that we are not a genius.
Well I'm of the opinion that their end product was the result
of what they did, their approach, etc...
So then that's the key.
What could one do to produce that kind of high quality product?
No paint by number system is going to get you there.
Bach used to say that anyone could do what he did if they were
willing to work hard enough.
Of course one has to work smart.
Mindless practicing of excercises won't get you there either.
reed
Reed Kotler
http://www.reedkotler.com home of a nice unix like toolset for windows NT/95
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